1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for remotely administering a server.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today are often implemented as servers in a data center where many hundreds or thousands of similar computer systems are installed. In such a data center server maintenance, both software and hardware maintenance is difficult to administer. Currently, when a fault occurs in a server in such a data center, a system technician must physically travel to the location of the server, inspect the server, identify the current configuration of components installed in the server, troubleshoot the fault, and identify any faulty components. Upon identification of the faulty component of a server, the system technician then must travel to a storage location of replacement components, retrieve a replacement component for the faulty component, and travel back to the server to replace the faulty component. This multi-trip maintenance is time-consuming and inefficient. In fact, in large data centers that covers thousands of square feet, the multi-trip maintenance is extremely costly in terms of system technician time. Furthermore, information describing the fault occurring in a server is typically located in various different fault logs, stored in different computer storage locations. Such information describing a particular fault is also typically difficult to locate with a particular fault log itself.